Without intentionally exploring the purpose of your family, the purpose is controlled by whomever makes the loudest shouts. Since the way children develop responsibility is through testing parental boundaries, it is often the children who shout the loudest. Or the shouting may come from the father or mother who are not aware that clarity is more powerful than making boundaries, and clarity does not require shouting. Clarity only requires statement.
Handbook for Creating Ordinary Relationship
Here are twenty surefire ways to undermine the Archetypal center of your family and thereby create ordinary family relationship:
1. Keep the television or radio on while you eat meals. This makes the television or the radio the center of your family. Make the television the center of your family life together.
2. Bring the newspaper to the meal table, or let the children bring toys. This makes the (mostly horrifying) news or the (corporation-marketed) toys the center of your family.
3. Do not eat meals together. This makes the Box’s stomach (in each person) more important than the family purpose.
4. When you want something from your mate or the children, just shout for them in the house. This destroys respect and shatters spaces.
5. Do not hold boundaries for the children. Let them scream their way out of the boundaries that you do set. This drives children crazy because then they have no boundaries on which they can structure their world and their intelligence.
6. Serve sugar-sweetened foods at all your meals. This makes sugar the center of your family.
7. Do not tell the children what will happen next. Instead, just order them around. This terrorizes the children and makes them recalcitrant and centered on themselves for mere survival.
8. Let the children interrupt adult conversation and adult spaces with their teasing each other, their questions, their getting hurt, anything to get your attention. This shows children that adults have weak attention and that the space is not held and they are not safe.
9. Do not have fun as adults. This proves to the children that they should never grow up and take responsibilities because adults are not passionate and obviously do not have fun.
10. Do not have physical or emotional intimacy with your partner in front of the children. This shows children that physical or emotional intimacies are bad, or at least not included in the image of “the good adult” who your children will imitate.
11. When a child gets hurt, tell them that nothing happened. Do not listen to their feelings. This psychologically abuses the children into distrusting their own experience.
12. Expect your children to take responsibilities before they are truly capable of being responsible (around fifteen years old). Expect your children to brush their teeth, go to bed, clean up their room, do their homework, etc., without you holding the space for it. This expectation destroys their innocence. When your children fail to meet your expectations this gives you reason to resent and hate your own children.
13. Do not read, sing, dance, or play musical instruments to or with your children, or let them see you loving to do these things. This starves their spirit.
14. Never apologize to your children. Never admit to being wrong. This makes children think they are supposed to be perfect like you.
15. Never let your children know that they hurt you. Then they think they are powerless and do not have to learn to manage their power.
16. Do not teach children to be sensitive to various kinds of spaces (e.g., adult meetings, churches, ceremonies, prayer or meditation spaces). This way nothing is sacred to them because they think nothing is sacred to you.
17. Only give your children your partial attention for a minimum amount of time. This keeps your children starving for attention so they keep coming back to you and trying to manipulate you to give them more. Then children learn that getting negative attention is better than getting no attention at all, and they wrap you around their finger with the problems they cause.
18. Use your financial resources to buy new appliances, cars, clothing and computers. This shows children that possessing objects is more important than being together.
19. Praise or blame your children for their behavior instead of appreciating them or being-with them. Then children think that praise and blame is how to manipulate the other people in their lives.
20. Send your children to public school and expect the teachers to raise them (to become like their friends who are also sent away from their parents). This shows children the weakness and confusion of their family and takes away their hope of having authentic parents who provide support with family bonding and family love. This shows your children how to try to give away the responsibility for their own family if they ever have one.
Having the center of your family located someplace other than where the purpose of your family is, typically fills the “relationship creation zone” that your family represents with ordinary human relationship. Then, the chances for extraordinary human or Archetypal Relationship happening in the family are lost.
Something different occurs in a family only when the adults hold and navigate the center of the family into extraordinary human or Archetypal Relationship. The practice for navigating the center of the family into extraordinary human or Archetypal Relationship is to consistently ask and answer this question: “In the name of which purpose are we as a family gathered in this moment?”
Aim to keep the center of the family in the Adult context, the responsible context, and the extraordinary context. Make this your purpose, and make your purpose top priority, no matter what else is happening. Do not forget your priority. Strive to keep 10 percent of your attention focused on navigating the family space to consistently answer the question of purpose.
SECTION 18-C
Your Attention and Your Children
The central skills for continuing relationship experiments even when there are kids around involve paying attention to your attention.
As we discussed at length in Section 6-B, bringing the woman to life requires 100 percent of the man’s attention on the woman. If that is so, what about the attention needed by the kids? How is the man supposed to place 100 percent of his attention on his woman if 60 percent (more or less) of his attention is already on the kids and the family – listening for the mood, the tone, and the well-being of each member and navigating how things are and what needs to be done. Holding space for the family already requires an enormous amount of the man’s attention.
Clearly, some new skills need to be developed. Without developing the new skills, twenty years of family life can go by and the couple, which is the core of the family, withers and dies due to lack of food.
The reason that attention plays such an important role in feeding your partner is that energy follows attention. That is, your energy flows where your attention goes. This phenomenon is obvious once you have heard it. What you place your attention on receives your energy.
Energy Follows Attention
To confirm the theory that energy follows attention, practice increasing your sensitivity so that you can detect where you are placing your attention and where you are flowing energy. For example, when eating, notice that when you look at the food on someone else’s plate you put your energy into their food. You can easily detect this in reverse. When someone else looks at the food on your plate, their energy goes into your food, and you can feel it.
When you walk in the shopping mall and you scan the other shoppers, your energy flows into them and they can feel it. Remember all the times when you have turned your head for no reason and you saw that a stranger was looking at you? You could actually feel their energy coming into you. When you look into another shopper’s eyes and they look into your eyes the exchange of energy can be like a flash of lightening. Start to notice how much attention you use to control your attention, so that you do not look into other people’s eyes and receive unwanted energy from them. This is the kind of sensing that will allow you to begin placing your attention on yo
ur partner and flowing them energy even in the midst of screaming thrashing kids.
Putting your attention on someone flows energy to them. This energy is real. This is the phenomena that is happening when, just as you are about to telephone someone, the phone rings and it is the person you were about to call.
Flowing energy to your partner is food that they need to continue living in their relationship to you. Sending cards and letters and gifts, bringing flowers and chocolates, these are all signs of placing attention and flowing energy. But these are not flowing energy. The flowers and chocolates are not enough. Flowers and chocolates are symbols of energy, not energy itself. Kisses, hand squeezes, holding the coat or opening the door, performing errands or favors, sending or bringing cards and gifts, even dinners out or vacations together are all forms of doing. No amount of doing flows energy. Doing is doing. Placing your attention on your partner and flowing them energy is being-with. Flowing energy to your partner can occur at the same time you are kissing, hand squeezing, holding the coat and so on. But the doing does not flow energy. Placing attention on flows energy. There is no substitute for placing your attention on your partner and flowing them energy. Doing by itself only gets things done. Doing does not feed their soul. Attention energy feeds their soul.
When the children are around, the children require attention, energy and care. When we look at our desk we see that the endless details of our busy lives also require our attention, energy and care. The consequences of not giving children and daily details our attention are loud and evident. The kids scream; the telephone gets cut off; there is no food on the table; the neighbors complain. Somewhere in the midst of this world, our partner, our mate, is lost.
We may tend to regard our mate as more of a colleague rather than a lover in the project of living and raising children, since our partner has the same goals as we do with the children and the details. Therefore, we work together to accomplish certain objectives: get the kids to school, have a birthday party, do Christmas with the relatives, and so on. Unfortunately, however, in the busy-ness of our daily lives, we can easily ignore the silent cries of our partner for presence, rather than ignore the quarreling children or our formidable to-do list.
As a way of creating another possibility for your partnerships, try this experiment: Decide right now to forever place Archetypal Relationship at the highest priority. Placing experiments in intimacy at the highest priority is different from giving those experiments the most time. Such experiments do not require much time. We forget this in our daily overwhelm. We forget that one moment of pure being-with has no time. Once we enter the intimacy of pure presence, time stops. You already know this. A moment is as long as a day is as long as forever because presence only happens now. A day of pure intimacy can occur in a moment if we are careful to focus 100-percent attention and, during that moment, flow 100-percent being-with energy to our partner. A feast happens in that moment, a restarting, a healing, a reinitiation. Moments of placing attention on our partner and flowing them energy like this because it is our highest priority will encourage our relationship to grow even when the kids are around.
Whose Energy Is It?
A common confusion about this principle that energy follows attention is to imagine that, if we are giving our attention and flowing our energy to our children and our life’s details all day long, by the end of the day we will be exhausted and all of our energy used up. We will then look at our partner as another needy child and think, “Oh, God! Not another one! Why don’t they leave me alone? I am tired. I am already used up. I have nothing left to give.”
The confusion comes from not realizing that the energy we flow when we place our attention on someone is not our energy. It is the energy of the Principles that we serve. In the case of our partner, the energy is Archetypal Love. Archetypal Love is already there wherever we are in unending abundance. The energy that we flow to our partner is not our energy.
Maybe you have had an experience like this: You returned home late one night, and you finally lay your exhausted aching bones down on a bed next to your partner ready to collapse into sleep. There was a good night kiss. The kiss went on a little longer. The kiss expanded from the lips to the neck to the arms and legs, fingers and toes. In a moment there was an aliveness and energy that came from nowhere and the exhaustion was gone like it never existed. The energy of Archetypal Love is not your energy.
The key to flowing energy is what we do with our attention. Energy flows where our attention goes. Start learning what you are doing with your attention so you can start learning what you are doing with your energy. If your attention is split between your partner and the children, your partner feels it. So do the children. Do not make your children dependent on always having your 100-percent attention. Support your children to be able to feel comfortable and safe while sometimes being self-entertaining. Support your children to learn to work with their own attention. The same with your partner. Then, make life a dance. Sometimes you are 100 percent with your children, sometimes 100 percent with the telephone, sometimes 100 percent with details, sometimes 100-percent with your partner. Sometimes you are splitting your attention two ways, sometimes five ways. Swirl your attention in blended spirals, then focus it precisely on one thing, then bounce it from one thing to another, then fuzz it into the whole field. Let the dance of your attention and your energy-flow unfold according to what is wanted and needed, never forgetting that Archetypal Love with your partner, and as the purpose of your family, is the highest priority. Even if the problems seem horrendous, do not forget your priority.
Learn to instantly drop everything and refocus 100 percent of your attention onto your partner, so that you can receive the 100-percent attention they are placing on you. Perhaps your partner has been placing 100-percent attention on you for years and you never noticed. If your attention is habitually split between your partner and an internal conversation with an enemy that you are engaging for a mutual low-drama-feeding-frenzy at work, you will never experience the 100-percent attention and the energy flow of Archetypal Love from your partner.
Make Time
One-hundred-percent attention experiencing 100-percent attention does not take a lot of time. We have developed a linear concept of time based on the idea of time scarcity. We spend our days chasing the clock, trying to catch up and fit everything into a limited twenty-four-hour day. We frantically review our schedule trying to find time. In this mode we will never find the time for intimacy with our partner, because kids and the chaotic details of our daily lives will expand to swallow up every moment. To give Archetypal-Love intimacy experiments top priority requires that we change our relationship to time.
Where did you get the time to read this sentence? We do not often ask ourselves such a question. But ask yourself now, where did you get the time to read this sentence? Our first answers will probably be something like: I got the time from the calendar; I borrowed the time from everything else I have to do today; God gave me the time; I looked for and found the time; I stole some time out of my day planner, and so on.
Right now you could be anywhere in the world doing anything. But here you are right now, reading this paragraph. Where did you get the time to read this paragraph? All of our previous answers sidestep our responsibility in this situation. The truth is, we are time makers. Anything that we do, we make the time to do it. If you brushed your teeth this morning you made the time to do it. If you wanted to brush your teeth this morning and did not do it, that was because you did not make the time to brush your teeth. You only do what you make the time to do. Anything that you do is through making the time to do it.
You have the power to make time. This is the power you exercise to make the time for placing 100-percent attention on your partner and flowing them energy. No matter what else is happening, no matter where you are, no matter what circumstances might make it seem impossible – even kids! – you have the time whenever you make it.
SECTION 18-D
Le
tting Go of Your Kids
The transition from adolescence to adulthood is not identified as significant in the tradition of our culture. By now in this book you should be sensing that this particular transition shapes the remainder of our children’s lives as adults, partners and parents. The lack of a rite of passage leaves our children directionless, like a compass with no needle (see Section 3-E for more on rite of passage). Without much effort you can build the legend in your family about the importance and sanctity of the adolescent-to-adult shift, and you can substantiate your stories by creating a series of rituals around it.
I will never forget the rising tension as each of my daughters approached her seventh birthday. In a pre-arranged ritual, each alone climbed the steep hill behind our house in Arizona, followed a hand-drawn map, and found her first pocketknife hidden away in the rocks. Such rituals mark turning points and important shifts of context in the growing up process (refer to the book From Magical Child to Magical Teen by Joseph Chilton Pearce for more details on the unfolding process). By formalizing transitions you publicly recognize these events and give them more of their proper place in our lives. Through ritualizing the end of childhood and letting go of your sons and daughters without strings attached, you help model for them the Archetypal context for their future relationships.
Instructions for Mothers
When your son (or daughter) turns eighteen years old, call up your friends, bake some cakes, open some champagne, close the curtains, turn up the music and have a mother graduation party. Your job as mother is fulfilled. You can take the role of mother and the job description of mother and you can put it back on the shelf. You can reclaim your name and step back into the world no longer as a mother but now as a woman. No matter what has happened, you have done the best job that you could. Now the job is over. You can let the job go. The past eighteen years have been what they were. Now, what is next for you? There is a whole world awaiting your next creative contribution.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 73
